stonepicnicking_okapi

In honor of Juneteenth!

[I read the annotated version on the Poetry Foundation website and liked the first footnote. The last sentence is especially important to remember: In an interview for Callaloo literary journal, Walker remarked: “I remember hearing a criticism of ‘For My People’ by two white critics whom I admired. They said my ballads either sounded like Paul Laurence Dunbar gone modern or Langston Hughes gone sour. They said some very nasty things about me, all of which I could proceed to ignore, because if one worried about the critics, one would never write.”]

For My People by Margaret Walker [from Poetry 1937]

For my people everywhere singing their slave songs
repeatedly: their dirges and their ditties and their blues
and jubilees, praying their prayers nightly to an
unknown god, bending their knees humbly to an
unseen power;

For my people lending their strength to the years, to the
gone years and the now years and the maybe years,
washing ironing cooking scrubbing sewing mending
hoeing plowing digging planting pruning patching
dragging along never gaining never reaping never
knowing and never understanding;

( Read more... )

1. Last day of school for the boys is tomorrow. There was supposed to be a picnic at Minisculus' but it's too wet. Tonight is a ceremony at the middle school (not a graduation--they have stressed that) and then Minor is staying for the 8th grade dance.

2. I noticed something interesting (to me) last week during the ceiling catastrophe. I missed drinking any coffee Tuesday because I was in exile, but I didn't notice it. I didn't get that nail-being-driven-in-the-temple headache I normally get. Like, nothing, no physical sign that I was caffeine deprived. So maybe the anxiety adrenaline of the ceiling held it at bay? I don't know. I'm just making an observation. I started to feel it on Day 2 but I got some coffee and of course it went away

3. I'm about halfway through The Seamstress by Maria Duenas and enjoying it. It's an epic life story of a woman from Spain who lives in Morocco during the Civil War. I'm at the even of WWII now. Finished Bridge to Teribithia with Minisculus and now we're reading something called Clementine which is the typical 'kid does pranks and gets into trouble' story.

4. I cracked open a new jigsaw: Around the Word in 50 Plants.

5. No news from the Visiting Angels. :( I'm hoping everything is okay. I uploaded the COVID vaccine info per request but it's been crickets for a week.

6. I REALLY need to get cracking on my casefic for the exchange.

7. I like train ambient channels:



6.

This weeks' prompt was: color. This is called an In Memorium stanza.

drupe by okapi

of orange-yellows, reds which leach
in blush upon the most sun-kissed
of rounded flesh, in velvet mist
enveloped, casting fog on each

and every curvature whose breach
reveals a more uniform gold
of corpus, sweet perfumes unfold,
attracting wasps and buyers, speech

is needless, scent alone can preach
its Good News, bushel baskets filled
to rolling, dark hearts hedged and grilled
by dark nettles which overreach

on pitting, nectar colors teach
the artist how to mix the rich,
the once-child to remember, stitch
a patch of farmer’s market peach

1. To recap, Monday night the horrible leak which had been growing and growing in the boys' bedroom ceiling became more horrible and after a really scary night of buckets and pails and bins and drip-drip-drip which drove me partially insane, and a morning which including sleeping on in the car, the roof caved in.

So I fled to an extended stay hotel. I thought the boys would come with me, but they didn't want to. They stayed with their father.

So contractors came and did an estimate, and then they came and fixed the enormous hole in the ceiling and the nasty wall of mold which was in the boys' closet. So they've had 2 nights of no leaks, so I've come back home.

I felt like I was Julia Roberts in Sleeping with the Enemy or a fugitive or something. In a liminal state of neither here nor there. The closest eating place was Chick-fil-a but I drove to get a tuna sub. It's PRIDE month, goddammit, no homophobic waffle fries (or peach milkshake, which sounds even better) for you! I didn't turn on the TV either the whole time. I think some people live there because the school bus came. And I heard kids and saw a cat in a window. Today is the last full day of school for the boys. They have three half days next week.

2. Today is FESTA day which is the 12th anniversary of the debut of BTS and last night in Seoul, jhope had a concert and all seven were in attendance, including SUGA!!! So it is a very good day.

Title: I is for [Requiescat] In Pace
Fandom: Sherlock Holmes (ACD)
Rating: Gen
Notes: Angst, part 5 of Time Loop: Reichenbach, set during "The Final Problem, this is a linked series of ficlets in which Watson relives Reichenbach based on theories collated in The Annotated Sherlock Holmes about what happened on that day.
Length: 500
Characters: Holmes & Watson
Prompt: acidic
Warning: Major Character Death
Summary: Watson wakes up on 4 May 1891 in Switzerland with Holmes (for the fifth times) and elects not to accompany Holmes to the Falls.

( Read more... )

Title: I is for Incarnate
Fandom: Sherlock Holmes (ACD)
Rating: Gen
Notes: Angst, part 3 of Time Loop: Reichenbach, set during "The Final Problem, this is a linked series of ficlets in which Watson relives Reichenbach based on theories collated in The Annotated Sherlock Holmes about what happened on that day.
Length: 500
Characters: Holmes & Watson & Moriarty & Moran
Prompt: timid
Warning: Major Character Death, elements of the supernatural
Summary: Watson wakes up on 4 May 1891 in Switzerland with Holmes and discovers Moriarty more than what he seems.

( Read more... )

So I am a week behind on my 52 poem challenge. Last week the prompt was to write a poem about a famous person (who is dead) and the focus is on a small incident in their lives. So I chose Rilke and found an anecdote about how he had received a business letter and was composing a response, pacing near the castle where he was staying, and the first line of the first of the Duino Elegies came to him. So that's what I wrote about.


Dear Sir: Regarding a matter which requires your urgent attention... by okapi

The letter arrived in the morning post.
The envelope was dull, the lettering
was careful and upright. The poet sighed.
He slit the shroud, unfolded the dead words,
and read and sighed again. It must be deal with.
Sums would be required. On paper too fine
for the purpose, he began then stopped, stood,
and left, marching from castle to bastions
overlooking the sea, he paced the length,
back and forth, as the strong bora wind blew,
his mind was full of numbers and figures,
back and forth, he paced, back and forth until—
he heard it
on the roar—
“Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’
hierarchies?”
by nightfall, there would be a birth, a verse
long-awaited as well as a piece
of correspondence, dull, careful, upright
left unanswered on the edge of a desk.


---

And here is the first stanza of the first elegy of the Duino Elegies

from The First Elegy by Rainer Maria Rilke [trans. Stephen Mitchell}

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels' hierarchies?
and even if one of them pressed me suddenly against his heart:
I would be consumed in that overwhelming existence.
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.
Every angel is terrifying.
And so I hold myself back and swallow the call-note of my dark sobbing.
Ah, whom can we ever turn to in our need?
Not angels, not humans, and already the knowing animals are aware
that we are not really at home in our interpreted world.
Perhaps there remains for us some tree on a hillside, which every day we can take into our vision;
there remains for us yesterday's street and the loyalty of a habit so much at ease
when it stayed with us that it moved in and never left.
Oh and night: there is night, when a wind full of infinite space gnaws at our faces.
Whom would it not remain for--that longed-after, mildly disillusioning presence,
which the solitary heart so painfully meets.
Is it any less difficult for lovers?
But they keep on using each other to hide their own fate.
Don't you know yet?
Fling the emptiness out of your arms into the spaces we breathe;
perhaps the birds will feel the expanded air with more passionate flying.

1. Last night there was a massive leak in the boys' bedroom and I had every bucket, trash bin, baking sheet, and towel out. We called the emergency maintenance twice and got an AI voice telling us that it sounded like something that could be dealt with during business hour. Fuck you, you miserable pieces of shit.

So the drip-drip-drip all night drove me insane.

We even banged on the door upstairs but she wouldn't open the door!

I put the boys in my bed and I slept on the floor for about 2 hours. Then around 430, I got up, meditated, made the boys' lunches and packed a bag and went to the car. And slept for about an hour.

The ceiling crashed in about 7 am as the boys were getting ready for school. It's a mess. It's a complete and utter shite fest.

Then I fled and let the boys' father handle the maintenance and building management.

( tw: cutting )

We had put in maintenance requests about the leak but of course they ignored them.

I am getting sleepy so I may go back to the car and take a nap. I suppose I could take a nap in the library but...I feel like getting in the car and going to a hotel and starting fresh with a new name and a new identity.

2. The job hasn't called me back, but I think I submitted all the paperwork.

This is my new favorite YT Garron Noone, the Irishman.

Title: I is for Imaginary
Fandom: Sherlock Holmes (ACD)
Rating: Gen
Notes: Angst, part 1 of Time Loop: Reichenbach, set during "The Final Problem, this is a linked series of ficlets in which Watson relives Reichenbach based on theories collated in The Annotated Sherlock Holmes about what happened on that day.
Length: 500
Characters: Holmes & Watson
Prompt:
Summary: Watson wakes up on 4 May 1891 in Switzerland with Holmes and discovers Moriarty is his own invention.

( Read more... )

The great thing about being a fan is unearthing canon you've never heard of. I never expected such a thing with the Sherlock Holmes fandom but here we are.

This is the full text of is a very short story written by Arthur Conan Doyle first published in the Bazaar number of the Student on 20 November 1896. The Bazaar was held to raise money required to erect a pavilion and complete the equipment of a 13-acre field that had been recently purchased for the University of Edinburgh.

( Full text of The Field Bazaar )